Switch tabs using Selenium WebDriver with Java

Question

Using Selenium WebDriver with JAVA. I am trying to automate a functionality where I have to open a new tab do some operations there and come back to previous tab (Parent). I

Answer 1

The first thing you need to do is opening a new tab and save it's handle name. It will be best to do it using javascript and not keys(ctrl+t) since keys aren't always available on automation servers. example:

public static String openNewTab(String url) {
    executeJavaScript("window.parent = window.open('parent');");
    ArrayList tabs = new ArrayList(bot.driver.getWindowHandles());
    String handleName = tabs.get(1);
    bot.driver.switchTo().window(handleName);
    System.setProperty("current.window.handle", handleName);
    bot.driver.get(url);
    return handleName;
}

The second thing you need to do is switching between the tabs. Doing it by switch window handles only, will not always work since the tab you'll work on, won't always be in focus and Selenium will fail from time to time. As I said, it's a bit problematic to use keys, and javascript doesn't really support switching tabs, so I used alerts to switch tabs and it worked like a charm:

public static void switchTab(int tabNumber, String handleName) {
        driver.switchTo().window(handleName);
        System.setProperty("current.window.handle", handleName);
        if (tabNumber==1)
            executeJavaScript("alert(\"alert\");");
        else
            executeJavaScript("parent.alert(\"alert\");");
        bot.wait(1000);
        driver.switchTo().alert().accept();
    }